She looked out toward the yard where one of her sculptures sat. She had been with my father since they were teenagers.
“He doesn’t fly in to see you. He doesn’t send you tickets to see him. Don’t cut my sandwich,” I said.
She looked at the pile and stopped. There was only one whole sandwich left. She took a measured breath. “We’re trying to save for the move.”
“There’s something you aren’t saying.” I picked up my photo bag, about to leave.
“Wait, you haven’t heard my news. You remember my friend Tom Watts—the one who does the ceramic pieces with those incredibly thin walls? It looks like he’s convinced an editor at Architectural Digest to attend my opening. With a photographer. I think our luck is turning.”
I just shook my head.
“I know. You don’t like the idea of luck,” she said.
“Not really.”
“I’ll do the eighth pour,” she said, setting her jaw. “I won’t leave anything to chance.”
“I wasn’t saying … I just meant you’ve worked really hard. It has nothing to do with luck. This is such good news.”
“I’ll feel more confident if I do the eighth.”
This meant she would have a new bill to pay at the metal forgers. Her sculptures required jumbo flatbeds, blankets and drop cloths, spools of industrial rope, crates and commercial cranes to move them. When I brought this up, she said, “Things have a way of working out.”
The night of the opening, she appeared to be right. Golden lanterns hung in the rafters of the gallery. They reflected my mother’s work in a striking way, magnifying everything she imagined to be true that night. She sold two of the smaller works within the first hour and had promises for more sales, the gallery owner taking a deposit on one of the largest pieces for a corporate client. A favorite of mine appeared in the magazine. We weren’t on solid ground yet but we could see solid ground floating out in front of us.
But this was 2007, and shortly after the magazine article appeared, the gallery called to say the corporate client felt it was prudent, based on current market indicators, to hold off acquiring any new art at this time. The subprime market was buckling. The economic crisis had begun. She received a kill fee. And like that, the gallery owner began to express doubt about selling her work. “Maybe when the economy picks up,” she said.
Mom had several pieces of mid-century modern furniture that she began to sell off. One Italian chaise, an Aalto, drew down two thousand dollars. After the new owners left with it she went up to her bedroom to lie down. The chaise had been her grandmother’s.
In time we were turning and looking before taking a seat to make sure a couch or chair was still in place. She embellished the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears to keep Lola from worry, saying, “The chairs are out for repairs.”
I was out roaming one evening with a 28mm lens on my old digital SLR. When I came in and started up the stairs to the second floor, I heard Mom on her speakerphone. I assumed she was talking with Dad. The light from her bedroom pooled on the carpet in the hall and I sat down near that pool and listened. Lola was already asleep.
It was her brother, Hal, the high-end banker who sat on several boards, drove a Mercedes or two and fed regularly on pate. She often expressed her confusion that they had been raised by the same parents in the same house.
I was about to get up and head to my room when I heard him say, “I’ve gone over that.”
“You can’t be serious,” she said.
“Have I ever not been serious?” he asked.
Maybe he meant to say, when giving advice. But Uncle was a cheerless soul, and his second wife, Margaret, was worse. My mother choked up rather than answer.
“This is about the housing bubble,” he went on. “You need to sell the house and find some practical work while you can. If things go as badly as some of us think we could all be underwater. My money’s tied up or I’d buy one of your objects to help out. You know, if Margaret had any eye for art.”
Normally my mother would have said, One of my objects? in a pointed way. It troubled me that she had gone mute.
“You’re absolutely certain?” she said finally.
“Have I ever not been … ?” That unsaid word filled the house like a gas leak. It was a good thing we had learned to avoid matches.
Mom met with a Realtor a few days later, set some potted plants in bloom around the front steps, and trimmed the hedges. Our property was a little odd, and Mom wasn’t sure how the sale would go. The small house had once been the butler’s quarters on a large estate, but it and the tall barn-like garage that could store up to six cars had been split off and sold as a parcel years ago. She decided to keep the price low. The crash wasn’t in full play yet, but she wasn’t taking any chances. After paying off two mortgages, we leased an apartment in Rogers Park in a far northeast pocket of Chicago. Without a proper space to work in, it was clear that she would have to quit sculpting cold turkey or find someone to lend her studio space. She made a stream of calls. It was unfortunate that she worked so large. Mom said something romantic to me about the benefits of a fallow period though I saw her smart.
We left our keys in the kitchen where Dad had tossed his.
The new place was a one-bedroom apartment at the top of a three-story walkup. There were six apartments in all. The L ran along the back side of the building causing a noticeable trembling and a high, piercing sound every few minutes, and the parks appeared to be full of junkies. She had looked everywhere. It was either this or head into a spiral of credit card debt.
“You’re taking the bedroom,” Mom said as we looked around.
Standing by the bedroom window, I could see the faces of passengers looking our way as if they hoped to catch someone fighting or hooking up or breaking down or shooting up. But I didn’t complain about the location of my room. I would be the only one with a bedroom door. “Lola gets the living room,” she said. “And I’ll take the dining room. I can use the highboy and the two Japanese folding screens to make a little privacy.”
I was having a hard time hiding my anger at all this sacrifice. “I’ll take the dining room,” I countered. I turned to face her but she shook off my signal.
By late afternoon we had looked through all the boxes marked Lola and hadn’t found her dolls. Starting down the stairs to check the car, I stopped when I saw a guy backing out of one of the two first-floor apartments. He was pulling a T-shirt over his head, clearly in a hurry to be somewhere. When he turned and saw me, the voice of an old man came from inside the apartment.
“Ajay! Ajay! Do not forget to lock the door!”
It wasn’t the work Ajay had done on his body that pinned me to the stairs. I didn’t care about things like that. But it was like bumping into someone with the same features as a lover or old friend—he had a familiarity I didn’t know what to do with. He smiled and I found it hard not to smile back and that made me feel even more peculiar.
Returning upstairs, I told Mom I had forgotten the keys and would go down again shortly. I mentioned seeing one of our neighbors—this guy on the first floor who seemed nice—and then I got back to work.
I was surprised when she brought him up late in the afternoon. The weather was burn-in-hell August. We had no AC, and we hadn’t found the box with the tower fan. She kept saying, “Maybe the movers stole it.” And probably by the time we were completely unpacked there was no other way to account for the missing items. She had found the movers on the cheap. But I doubted a tower fan would have done much good. The heat from all three floors rose steadily and came to a dead stop in our unit.
As I unpacked Lola’s picture books, I lingered over one I had read to her a hundred times, Bye Bye,